OceanEHR platform - NT Health, Australia

Demonstrates: a secure way of sharing an individual’s healthcare information between care providers

Project:

Background:

The Northern Territory Department of Health provides health care to all territorians across the vast, remote geographical area of the northern Australia, including servicing the health needs of the indigenous community.

To address identified inadequacies in security, access control and privacy management.

Overview:

NT's My eHealth Record (MeHR), formerly known as the Shared Electronic Health Record, is a way of securely sharing an individual’s health information between their healthcare providers. The MeHR service was designed to overcome fragmentation of clinical information by ensuring it could be accessed quickly and easily by participating healthcare providers. The MyEHR service is operated by eHealthNT, NT Department of Health. It began operating since 2004 using PDFs as a means to share basic information and is based predominantly in the Northern Territory, with some coverage in surrounding Northern and Central Australia. It is similar, but separate, to the national eHealth record system, My Health Record (previously known as the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record or PCEHR).

Objective:

To support healthcare in NT, especially the remote indigenous population. Also, to enhance the existing Shared EHR platform so that it can store atomised, structured data using detailed clinical models (DCMs)/archetypes from the Australian Digital Health Agency's Clinical Knowledge Manager repository.

Our solution:

The NT Department of Health worked with our Ocean team and utilised our OceanEHR eHealth platform to create a solution that included:

Key results:

Over 10 million health record documents converted and stored on the OceanEHR platform

A shared EHR that interfaced with many disparate clinical systems including acute hospital, general practice and community care

Structured, pdf, CDA and other data types in a single view

Integration with existing systems using standards such as HL7, CDA and, of course, openEHR

Key Benefits:

Improved healthcare for the mobile indigenous population

Improved efficiency due to access to a shared electronic health record

Reduction in risk, by giving the correct information to the clinician at the point of care

Increased probability of project success by having clinical engagement with clinicians that understand their domains

Flexibility to interoperate with future systems such as the national 'My Health Record' (previously known as the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record)

The ability to comply with current and future Australian standards

Testimonial:

“The successful My eHealth Record project, using OceanEHR, has enabled NT to consolidate health information from multiple data types and health repositories into a single, standard and consistent health record for a person. Implementing “atomic” health data in the EHR is building the foundation for the next phase to offer Decision Support and Advanced Care Planning.”